"A lightsome eye, a soldier's mien,
A feather of the blue,
A doublet of the Lincoln green—
No more of me ye knew,
My Love!
No more of me ye knew!"
Yes, that was all she had known ... O, how foolish, foolish she was—a silly sentimental girl of the kind that she most despised! Yet, if only she had never seen him!
And at that moment Armand de la Roche-Guyon came round the corner of the road.
Horatia stood still, petrified. It was as if her thoughts had taken body, for he was gone—how could he be here ... walking rapidly towards her like this, bareheaded—flesh and blood. Before her heart had recovered its broken pulsations he was up to her.
"What, are you not gone?" she faltered.
"They told me you had walked this way," he said rapidly in his own tongue. "I have been to the Rectory; you were not there. I could not go—mon Dieu, I could not go.... Give me your basket; let us go back by the field path; it is close here."
She gave him the basket without a word, suffocated by the tumult in her heart, and dominated by the change in him, by the ardour and purpose which radiated from him, making him seem taller and even more desirable. He had the air of a young conqueror; but he was unsmiling, which was rare. Now she knew what the night had been trying to tell her....
They came in a moment to the gap in the hedge, by the oak-tree, an unauthorised way of attaining the field-path. It seemed right that he should know of it, though little less than a miracle. He held aside the twigs and brambles so that she could pass. And when she had stepped through everything was clear to her, and she knew that in entering the shorn September field, lit with its low yellow moon, she had come into another country, dazzlingly strange, but her inheritance, her home. She half turned, and was caught in Armand's arms, her lips to his; and thus, beneath a tree, in the gloaming, like any village girl, did Horatia Grenville, who cared not for love, give and receive her first kiss.
Behind her, for a wonder and a benediction, hung the great luminous shield of the harvest moon, and the scattered blackberries lay among the leaves and stubble, like a sacrifice to joys unfathomed.
CHAPTER X